THRONE AND LIBERTY is built on cooperative experiences, from intense guild vs. guild battles to epic Castle Sieges where teamwork and strategy guide players to victory. And now, the game’s latest update brings the Altar of Calanthia, another example of engaging content where team coordination and synergy are the keys to winning. This new piece of player versus environment (PvE) content is the game’s first 12-player raid, and aims to elevate THRONE AND LIBERTY’s cooperative play to a new level.
“We felt it was the perfect time to introduce raids as a form of long-form, weekly content,” says Jaehyeon Kim, Lead World Content Designer at FirstSpark Games/NCSOFT. "Raids offer a higher degree of complexity and cooperation than standard party play, and we wanted to give players a fresh, large-scale challenge that requires coordination and commitment.“
The challenge behind the new raid lies in players teaming up to take on Calanthia, a defeated witch who has turned toward necromancy to revive her fallen allies. As she becomes more consumed by obsession and descends into madness, players must stop her before her forbidden necromantic rituals plunge the world into irreversible chaos.
Calanthia’s powers of necromancy and forbidden magic threaten all of Solisium
Development teams at both NCSOFT and Amazon Games strove to deliver a fresh and meaningful experience for both casual and hardcore audiences. For casual audiences, players will experience joy of teamwork and each team member having a specific role to fulfill. For hardcore players, the dev teams have designed challenging content that rewards mastery of the raid’s unique mechanics.
The Altar of Calanthia raid consists of three main parts, each culminating in an intense boss battle. The battle with the raid’s first boss is there to teach players the fundamentals of 12-player combat and teamwork. Subsequent encounters encourage advanced tactics in party positioning and switching between roles. The final battle against Calanthia presents players with the most complex challenge, where coordination, diverse role distribution, and strategy is the only way to survive. Additionally, the raid will contain three difficulty tiers: Normal, Difficult, and Nightmare. The Nightmare tier will arrive a few weeks after the previous two tiers, giving players time to master the raid’s mechanics before taking on the ultimate challenge.
Heroes will need skill in both combat and coordination to be victorious
“In this 12-player raid, a single boss is tackled by two separate parties, which means role distribution differs slightly from previous cooperative dungeons,” says Kim. “Unlike previous co-op dungeons where a single tank handled aggro, this raid requires two tanks to take turns managing the boss, which is a key mechanic. Mastering this switch-based system will be crucial for success.”
For more details on the Altar of Calanthia raid, visit the deep dive article on the raid. And for the latest news on THRONE AND LIBERTY, visit the official site.